Gears of War: E-Day PC Preload Starts Today With Hardware Ray Tracing Required

Gears of War: E-Day is opening pre-installation on September 29 at 8 a.m. Pacific (15:00 UTC) on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Steam. Premium Edition players can begin early access on October 1 at the same time, while the worldwide launch follows October 6.

For PC players, the more consequential detail is the final hardware floor published by The Coalition: the game requires a hardware ray-tracing-capable graphics card and a 115GB SSD. That makes the preload useful not only for avoiding a large launch-day download, but also as a reminder that older high-end raster GPUs without dedicated ray-tracing support are outside the stated support boundary.

The Coalition lists DLSS, FSR, TSR or XeSS alongside all three performance targets. The published 1080p, 1440p and 4K figures therefore should not be interpreted as native-resolution performance guarantees.

The PC feature list separately includes DLSS 4.5, AMD FSR 4 and Intel XeSS 3.0, plus ray-traced reflections, shadows and global illumination, HDR, ultrawide support, advanced graphics settings and a built-in benchmark. Actual performance still depends on the selected reconstruction mode and graphics settings, so these specification tiers are developer targets rather than independent Core Tech Tips benchmarks.

All three tiers specify 115GB of storage on an SSD. The requirement is not simply 115GB of free space on any drive: The Coalition specifically requires solid-state storage.

Players planning to preload should leave additional free space beyond the stated install size for normal installation overhead and later updates. The Coalition's published figure establishes the game's requirement, not a guarantee that the installation will never grow after launch.

The unusual part of E-Day's PC specification is less the top-end RTX 5070 Ti or RX 7900 XT target than the baseline architecture assumptions. Hardware ray tracing, SSD storage and image reconstruction are built into the published support and performance tiers from minimum upward.

That makes post-launch testing especially useful. The built-in benchmark should make controlled comparisons easier once the game is playable, but the developer specification table by itself cannot establish frame-time consistency, VRAM pressure or image-quality tradeoffs among DLSS, FSR, TSR and XeSS.